2017 Book Prize Winners Announced

Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has announced the winners of its annual book awards for poetry and short fiction. The winners were chosen from more than 1,200 submissions from around the world.

The Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for 2017 goes to Sara Batkie for her manuscript Better Times, chosen by guest-judges Chigozie Obioma and Christine Sneed with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. Batkie was born in Seattle and raised in the wilds of Connecticut and Iowa, where she received her BA in English from the University of Iowa in 2008. She left for the big city soon after to pursue her Masters in Creative Writing at New York University and graduated from the Fiction program in 2010. Her stories have been published in various journals, received mention in the 2011 Best American Short Stories anthology, and, most recently, honored with a 2017 Pushcart Prize. Currently she lives in Brooklyn and works as the Writing Programs Director for The Center for Fiction.

The winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry is Luisa Muradyan Tannahill for her manuscript American Radiance, chosen by guest-judges Shara McCallum and Hilda Raz with Editor-in-Chief Kwame Dawes. She will receive a $3,000 prize and publication from the University of Nebraska Press. Tannahill is originally from Odessa, Ukraine, and is currently a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Houston. Luisa received her MFA from Texas State University and currently serves as the Editor of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. She was the recipient of the 2016 Inprint Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and has had work appear in Poetry International, West Branch, Ninth Letter, the Los Angeles Review, Rattle, and the Paris-American, among others.

Founded in 1926, Prairie Schooner is a national literary quarterly published with the support of the English Department at UNL. It publishes fiction, poetry, essays and reviews by beginning, mid-career, and established writers.